While some may argue that the configuration listed above is completely overkill for an undemanding, rudimentary hard drive performance and reliability evaluation, the system is our primary evaluation unit and should reduce the number of bottleneck variables to as low as possible. As such, it provides a more than adequate environment for our Seagate Constellation ES 2TB drives in both RAID0 and RAID1 configurations.

SeaTools for Windows is a
comprehensive, easy-to-use diagnostic tool that allows users to quickly
determine the condition of the disc drive in an external hard drive, desktop or
notebook computer. In addition, it includes several tests that will examine the
physical media on any compatible Seagate or Maxtor disc drive and any other
non-Seagate disc drive.

The drives passed the
SeaTools Short Generic tests for “outer edge,” “inner edge” and “random read,”
but we should note that the noise levels on these drives are above average and even
somewhat excessive. While Seagate has managed to design some very
power-efficient and eco-friendly enterprise drives, it appears to have
sacrificed some audible noise value in the process. Although we have no
professional decibel measuring equipment on hand to properly quantify the
audible variables, we can insist that on a subjective level, these drives
operate close to the 55dB range when situated outside and apart from the rest
of the test system in an isolated scenario. In comparison, the Samsung
Spinpoint F1 RAID Edition drives operate at a consistent 45dB range during idle
desktop use and under load-intensive file transfers.

Crystal Disk Benchmarks

The next application we
used to test throughput performance was Crystal Disk Benchmark. The utility has
been around for a little over a year and a half and has provided a convenient
array of rudimentary read/write information about hard disks put to the test
against it.

2x Seagate Constellation
ES ST32000644NS 2TB drives in RAID1

2x Seagate Constellation
ES ST32000644NS 2TB drives in RAID0

2x Samsung Spinpoint F1
HE753LJ drives in RAID0

Based on the results, the
Constellation ES 2TB drives gained a 95% sequential write increase and a 120%
sequential read increase going from RAID1 to RAID0 configurations. Meanwhile, the
improvement between the Samsung Spinpoint F1 HE753LJ drives in RAID0 and the
Constellation ES drives in RAID0 resulted in a 35% sequential write increase
and an 88% sequential read increase for the latter drives.

HD Tach Benchmarks

We also decided to include
HD Tach results between a single Constellation ES drive, a pair of Constellation ES drives in
RAID0 and the Samsung Spinpoint F1 RAID Edition drives in RAID0.

Seagate Constellation ES ST32000644NS
2TB single drive

2x Seagate Constellation
ES ST32000644NS 2TB RAID0

2x Samsung Spinpoint F1
HE753LJ RAID0

The first thing we want to
note is the reduction in latency access times between a single Constellation ES
and a pair of them in RAID0. Latency was reduced by roughly 2.2ms with striping
enabled, and average read speeds increased by roughly 110 percent. In
comparison, the Samsung Spinpoint F1 HE753LJ RAID Edition drives produced an
increased latency access time of 2.8ms over the Constellation ES drives in
RAID0 and performed roughly 43 percent lower in average read speeds.

HD Tune Benchmarks

For our third set of tests,
we decided to run HD Tune, a popular hard disk utility with the ability to
measure drive performance, scan for errors, check drive health status using
S.M.A.R.T. monitoring and much more. For this occasion, we wanted to use it as
an additional verification utility for determining the accuracy of our hard
disk performance data.

HD Tune reports that a
single Constellation ES 2TB drive was able to manage a 105MB/s read speed
average and a 108MB/s write speed average with 113MB/s Burst Rate and 10.9ms
access time. In comparison, a pair of Samsung Spinpoint F1 HE753LJ RAID Edition
drives in RAID0 were able to manage a 131MB/s read speed, 137.2MB/s Burst Rate
and 12.2ms access time.

Another important factor
to note about these drives is their tendency to run very hot. We have been
operating these Constellation ES drives in both RAID0 and RAID1 test
configurations for the past two and a half months, and with almost every system
shutdown we would note that the drives were significantly warmer than we had we
had expected for enterprise-class products. Although the Constellation ES Product
Overview specifications page does note that “these nearline drives optimize
3.5-inch chassis performance with the lowest power draw and run cooler in
high-temperature environments,” it seems that they still run hot in consumer-oriented
desktop situations when compared to the Samsung Spinpoint F1 RAID Edition drives.